The Witches We Burned
We Are the Burners
There’s a popular meme floating around the internet:
"We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn."
The first time I saw it, I felt the rush of empowerment. YES. Here we come. You can’t get us now.
I understood the message—women rising, reclaiming power, refusing to be silenced. And I’m absolutely here for that.
But lately, I’ve been sitting with this idea, rolling it over in my mind.
And I’ve realized something unsettling.
We’re not just the daughters of those “they” didn’t catch.
We are also the daughters of those who lit the fires.
The Burners Among Us
History paints the burners as religious zealots, fearful and rigid, determined to control those who didn’t fit their mold.
But they weren’t just the ones in power.
The burners were also the ones who turned in their own neighbors, friends, and family to save themselves.
The ones who couldn't tolerate difference.
The ones who needed to be right so badly that they sacrificed others to protect their own fragile sense of order.
The ones who justified their cruelty with “It’s for the greater good.”
And we are watching it play out again today.
Modern-Day Witch Hunts
The burners of today don’t wield torches—they wield words.
They don’t light fires in the town square—they burn reputations, silence voices, and shame those who don’t comply.
They attack in comment sections, behind anonymous usernames, and sometimes, even with smiling faces in real life.
And if we’re honest? Sometimes, we are the burners.
photo credit Portraits by Katie Jo
When I Faced a Modern-Day Witch Hunt
Recently, a woman cyberbullied me for two days straight after I refused her unsolicited advice about sleep training my toddler.
She told me I was raising an abuser. That I was a bad mother. That I needed to do better.
When I told her to stop, she didn’t.
She turned on my friends, attacking them, too.
And yet—hundreds of others rose up, telling her to stop.
For the first time in my life, I stood in my truth without apologizing.
I set a boundary.
I refused to fight back with the same fire.
And in doing so, I realized something:
I had the chance that tens of thousands of women in history didn’t.
I had a voice.
I had witnesses.
I had others who wouldn’t stay silent when an accuser pointed the finger.
And that? That changes everything.
The Witch Burner in My Own Mind
The experience revealed something deeper—something beyond a stranger on the internet.
I recognized my own inner witch burner.
The voice inside that had told me, for two years of struggle, to be better.
To stop complaining.
To toughen up.
To motivate myself out of pain.
That voice had been lighting fires inside of me for years.
That cyberbully? She was just an echo of what I had already been telling myself.
So, standing up to her meant standing up to that part of me—the one that had been silencing my own needs and truths.
The Hard Truth: We Are the Burners
We talk about healing generational trauma.
We talk about breaking cycles.
But the hardest truth to face is this: We inherited the fire, too.
We burn each other with judgment, criticism, and intolerance.
We burn ourselves with self-berating thoughts, guilt, and relentless expectations.
We tie ourselves to the stake and light the tinder.
So the real question is: Will we ever learn?
A Different Future
What if we let people be?
What if we allowed space for differences without fear?
What if we recognized that control is an illusion and compassion is the only way forward?
Imagine if the witches had survived—the herbalists, the healers, the ones who refused to betray their own.
What kind of world would we live in now?
Because when the burners win—we all lose.
A few generations later, we have world wars.
Nuclear warheads.
Pandemics.
Human rights violations.
All fueled by fear, control, and the need to be right.
Enough is enough.
The wise ones survived long enough for us to learn from them.
The question is: Will we?
We Still Have Time
It’s not too late.
We can choose to stop the cycle.
To stop burning one another.
To stop burning ourselves.
We are not the daughters of the witches who escaped.
There were too few.
We are the burners.
But we don’t have to be.
Let’s Learn.
It’s time for accountability.
It’s time for compassion.
It’s time to put out the fire—before we burn it all down.
photo credit Portraits by Katie Jo
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